Well, you don’t. If you are in Mumbai, and you travel suburban, they find you……….

It happens in the evening. The maddening crowd while entering the trains. The struggle to get the foothold while in it. Juggling between hand straps above to get into a proper posture to avoid a slip disc. An between all this, trying to get a breathe of fresh air. That, if you are the lucky Bacchan category person, towering above all the lesser fortunate ones.

But no matter what you do, or how tall you are, your nose is designed to appreciate fragrances, and dissent smells in larger magnitude. Smells which emanates from the the sweaty wet bodies of the lesser fortunate surrounding you. Its out of no choice that their bodies smell, given the pitiful condition in which we travel in Mumbai.

But what happens when you get that sweat musky body odour indicating an un bathed body right at the start of the day.

This was a regular routine when I used to sit with an educational mate(I refrain from specifying school/college/university as it might offend him/her, cause it may become ovbious who it was). I used to dab my body with lot of fragrant talc(deo sprays were not on my items possessed list in those days) so as to avoid the odour, but the odour would ultimately overpower my delicately fragrant lavander talc. And to top it up, my colleague would come with a bad breathe indicating that there was no brushing activity since birth.

The only way I would could avoid this was by turning my face just enough to keep my nose out of the persons vicinity, holding breathe all the while the person talked. The bad breathe and the unbathed body smells would mix together and create a destroyer envelope around that person, and I would invariably end up into that envelope. For the sake of not hurting that person, and partly because the person was a class bully, I never complained the smell and would remind myself of Jagjit Singh’s song with a verse “if this is living, we shall live in this manner”

When I used to watch movies showing people fainting in the vicinity of foul body odour, I used to feel that things were over exaggerated. Today, as I write this down, remembering the episode of my life, I would say that I had been on the verge of collapsing many a times. The year ended and my ordeal was over since that person failed and had to stay back, engulfing some other unfortunate person within the envelope of distruction.

Very recently, I encountered another person in my train with almost similar problem. It so happened that I couldn’t sit in the regular seating area where I sat daily on the train. I sat next to another person who frequents that train. As I sat, I got the nostalgic feeling of seating on the classroom bench with my old chum. I immediately started my search for any vacant seat nearby area, but all was full. I had to endure that “nostalgia” all throughout my journey that day. Never after that did I sit near that person. Infact I avoid generally going in to the direction that the person sits.